In various apparatuses, such as cogeneration apparatuses and vacuum apparatuses, for example, a stable operation without a failure is a minimum function required. Also, even when the apparatus becomes out of order, the apparatus has to be recovered to a normal state as soon as possible. On the other hand, in an apparatus as being complicated and multifunctioned, there are many types of apparatus failures. However, methods of operation all types of failures have not yet been established in advance. Therefore, when a sign of abnormality is detected or an abnormality occurs in an apparatus, how to handle such situations often depends on previous knowledge of people (operators) who perform maintenance operations.
In such maintenance operations depending on the knowledge of the operators, as the number of apparatuses to be handled increases, the quality of maintenance operations may disadvantageously decrease.
To get around this problem, an information processing system can be used to diagnose and detect an abnormality of an apparatus and make an instruction for operation and maintenance details, etc.
Also conventionally, an abnormality diagnosis method or system has been reported in which human-dependent knowledge regarding apparatus failure operation is stored in an information processing system and, in place of previous determinations based on the expertise of operators, a phenomenon occurring in the apparatus is given to the information processing system, which then outputs a cause for and operation method of that abnormality. Examples of conventional technologies are as follows.
In a technology disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 4-74224 (Patent Document 1), structure knowledge indicating a correlation among components of an apparatus to be diagnosed and failure knowledge for each component are input, and a chain of structured abnormality of failures based on a correlation among the components of the apparatus is created with a process of reasoning these pieces of knowledge.
In a technology disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 4-359640 (Patent Document 2), causalities between a phenomenon occurring in an apparatus and a cause item thereof are represented by symbols, which are replaced with numerical values capable of distinguishing the strength of structured abnormality based on the type of symbols and are output as possible-cause candidates in the order in which the largest total value of additional values for each cause comes first.
In a technology disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 9-73315 (Patent Document 3), cases regarding failures are classified into symptom, cause, treatment, and treatment evaluation, and information input in free syntax in natural language regarding each item is stored. Among case information, terms that characterize the symptom, cause, treatment, and treatment evaluation are extracted, and failure cases are created as being arranged by symptom, cause, treatment, and treatment evaluation. Then, by inputting a keyword regarding symptom, cause, and treatment, the previous failure cases are searched for a similar or matching failure case.
In a technology disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2001-337828 (Patent Document 4), an abnormal symptom, a symptom determination condition, a cause, and a operation are input in advance for each component of an apparatus to create an abnormality knowledge rule. When an alarm occurs from the apparatus, based on the abnormality knowledge rule, an abnormality symptom, a cause, and a operation relevant to the rule are output.